Side-by-Side support in Windows Azure SDK 1.7

As you already seen Windows Azure SDK 1.7 brings a very interesting feature with the development tools that is the ability to run both version 1.6 and 1.7 side-by-side.

You might be thinking about why this is so interesting, so let me help you with that.

First a bit of history, since almost with every release of Windows Azure SDK the recurrent discussion would be about the changes that the new SDK was bringing and how that would affect the existing developed solutions. A lot of time we would hear that some developers couldn’t start to use the new version of the SDK immediately because they still had something done in the previously version and would first need to take a look in what was changed and only after that they would be able to start working.

So with this new feature this problem is finally addressed since we can maintain both SDK versions running side by side and so allowing us to get the best out of both worlds, using the new version for new development and the previous version for maintaining the existing ones.

Now that you already know the Why associated with this features, let’s take a look at How we can take advantage of that and also what it allows. In order to do this let’s start from the beginning and look at the Create new Project windows in Visual Studio.

This dialog allows us to choose the version of the Windows Azure Tools we would like to use in order to start the project, and by doing that adjusting the Role list based on the version we choose.

(Figure 2 – Role Templates for Windows Azure SDK 1.6)

(Figure 3 – Role Templates for Windows Azure SDK 1.7)

So this is a very interesting feature that will enable everyone to be even more productive but first of all, be able to start taking advantage of the new SDK without needing to go through uninstalling the previous version and installing the new version or even needing to ignore the newest version for a period of time because they are supporting some project that is still in the previous version.